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Contrary to popular perception, there is increasing evidence that prosodic focus (also known as contrastive stress, nuclear accent or sentence stress) is realized in many languages not only by increasing the F0, duration, intensity and upper spectral energy of the focused unit itself, but also by compressing the pitch range and intensity of the post-focus components. There has also been evidence that such post-focus compression (PFC) is a highly effective perceptual cue of focus. PFC has been reported, explicitly or implicitly, for English, German, Greek, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and interestingly, Mandarin Chinese. The case of Mandarin is especially remarkable because the language not only is tonal, but also has morpho-syntactic means of marking focus (fronting the focused item to the head of the sentence and inserting /shi4/ before the focused item). Thus PFC seems to be independent of the tonal and syntactic characteristics of the language.

The independence of PFC from tone is more clearly seen in a surprising new finding that it is absent in Taiwanese, a tone language closely related to Mandarin (Chen et al., to appear; Pan, 2007). More unexpectedly, PFC is also found in the same study to be absent in Taiwan Mandarin, an official language spoken in Taiwan which resembles Beijing Mandarin in many respects. It seems that Taiwan Mandarin has lost PFC due to close contact with Taiwanese, because pervasive bilingualism has been a fact of life in Taiwan for several generations. To make things more interesting, there is initial evidence that PFC is also absent in Cantonese, another southern Chinese language (Gu & Lee, 2007).

Assuming this is all true, a natural question is, how did PFC get into Beijing Mandarin in the first place? There are two apparent possibilities: (a) it arose automatically in the language, and (b) it entered Mandarin through language contact, just as it got lost in Taiwan through language contact. The fact that PFC did not arise automatically in Taiwanese and Cantonese makes (a) rather unlikely. But if we take (b) seriously, a further question arises: from what language did Mandarin acquire PFC?

Historically, Northern China was in close contact with many non-Chinese speaking populations, in particular, Mongolian and Manchurian, both ruling China for many generations. Interestingly, both Mongolian and Manchurian are Altaic languages. But so are Japanese and Korean (at least according to some language family classifications) which also likely to have PFC. Thus we are faced with an intriguing possibility: PFC originated from Altaic languages and then spread, through language contact, to Mandarin, and, in a similar manner, to European languages.

Outlandish as this possibility may seem, it is testable. That is, for it to be true, the following are also likely to be true: 1) PFC exists in all Altaic languages; 2) PFC exists in most northern Chinese dialects/languages but in few or no southern dialects/languages; 3) PFC exists in most European languages, except maybe a few in southern Europe; 4) PFC exists in no languages that have never been in close contact with Altaic, European or northern Chinese languages.

To test these predictions, we have developed experimental protocols consisting of basic production and perception experimental designs, highly efficient procedures and software tools for taking accurate acoustic measurements, and effective analysis procedures for determining the presence/absence of PFC in a language. Please see Chen et al. (to appear) for some details.

What we need now, however, are interested colleagues who, regardless of what they think of the Altaic Origin Hypothesis, are keen to find out whether PFC exists in languages of their own interest. We therefore call for interested parties to join us in this international collaborative project.

Please contact Yi Xu at yi.xuucl.ac.uk if you are interested. For more information about the methodology and potential impact of the project, please visit:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/yi/focus_crosslinguistic/

P.S. We do not yet have funding for this collaborative project, but we are thinking of applying for funding if there is enough interest.